


Reprieve

by Muriel_Perun



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-12 22:19:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7951333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muriel_Perun/pseuds/Muriel_Perun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Chitauri War, Loki escapes from his prison on Asgard and returns to New York to cause a little chaos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reprieve

**Author's Note:**

> A few years ago, while getting ready to write "Ant and Boot," I wrote this brief character study of Loki as a way of exploring his motives and desires.

            He sat in the window of a busy café in Times Square, idly stirring a mug of milky coffee into a lazy vortex with a wooden stick. It was the dinner hour, and most other patrons were devouring an assortment of evil-smelling dishes that did not tempt him to break his fast. As always, Loki ate sparingly because it kept him sharp, but he liked this drink, this “coffee.” It focused his thoughts. He wondered if it were laboriously produced by slaves in a remote location on the Earth. Nothing would surprise him less.

            He liked to sit and stir the drink, watching the liquid swirl. It reminded him of traveling through the bifrost, the spinning passageway that led from Asgard to the other realms. The rainbow bridge was broken, unless they’d repaired it by now with the tesseract. Now he—and Thor, perhaps—resorted to darker ways to reach the Nine Realms, ways that Heimdall could not follow with his hawk-bright eyes.

            Time was heavy here in Midgard, dense with small moments that would hardly be noticed in Asgard, where time was measured in eons, in the sweep of galaxies and the fate of worlds. In this place, a million petty, simultaneous actions added up to a second, the blink of an eye. A mortal man took a step, pronounced a word, made a decision. A man was alive one moment and dead the next. But what difference did that make to a god?

            Humans teemed like fleas in this place he had often returned to during his several journeys to New York, a place with the ironic name of Times Square. It was not square, but there were many Times here, as many as the hoards of people who infested its sidewalks, each burdened with a name, a thought, a trivial purpose. The lights flashed and the people moved through, chattering, encountering or avoiding each other as chance would have it, and it amused Loki to be the partner of chance. Send someone sprawling, lure another in front of a vehicle, save a third from certain death, and then mock the authorities as they carried on their ineffectual investigations into how this one died, how that one had been damaged. Disappear into a glamour in front of their eyes when they grew suspicious and thought they could take him.

            The creatures he felt the most kinship with on this world were called cats, and he never tired of observing their stratagems. Like him, they lived in the netherworld, the interstices of this city, this so-called society. They rubbed against you and purred because they were hungry, but their eyes were blank and calculating. If you touched them, they lured you in, and a moment later wrapped themselves around your arm with teeth and claws. They drew blood when the spirit took them. And yet they were so sly that they had made humans take them into their homes and hearts. He liked them. They were low animals, but their spirits were akin to his.

            Strange, even to himself, that he had returned once more to New York, “the scene of all his crimes,” as Father put it; the scene of his defeat of the Chitauri and the baffling of their attempt to use him as a tool, as he put it to himself. It was the last place Thor would seek him, he thought. Why would he return here, under the nose of the man in the metal suit, whom he had almost succeeded in damaging beyond repair, suit and mortal man alike? It would take them ages to find him, and that pleased him well. Watching suited Loki now, not fighting. Watching, and playing subtle games

            Until now, he had kept his exploits minor—how small, how petty they seemed! He had passed among these mortals as an old woman, and a young one, and a young man, and a grandfather. He had tried their souls with pleading, with aggression, with stories. He had appeared as himself, clad in their fashionable clothing, to observe them, men and women, looking at him with hunger in their eyes, for the wealth that they imaged he had; for his beauty. For he was beautiful to the creatures of this world. Even this simple worship was power, and he reveled in it. Their secretive looks amused him, but when mortals’ glances became too confident, too knowing, he led them by their desire into dark, secluded places and showed them monstrosities—glamours that opened the maw of hell, reflected their own grimy souls, or revealed the horrors of his dissatisfied heart.

            He longed to make a grand gesture—but he feared attracting the attention of Stark, the guardian of this place; of S.H.I.E.L.D., with their machines of war; and then of Thor, who was no doubt already searching for him elsewhere. Fear? No, it was not fear that kept him from acting out his whims. He did not wish to confront his brother now—that was all. Loki hunted out his amusements, a lone wolf, and declined for the moment to experience again his father’s wrath, his brother’s dogged disappointment, his mother’s unwavering but critical love. How tedious it all was in the end. How absurd that no one knew him, of all who claimed a right to dictate who he was. There was no one at his level. They were all, in the end, either his victims or his tormentors.

            So far, his father’s punishment was simple confinement, and he had gotten around that quickly enough. Next time—if there was a next time—he was sure his prison would not be quite so comfortable, nor would it have such an obvious flaw.

            He had expected bleak discomfort at the least, and, at the worst, torture. That Thor would decline to torture him, he knew, but the All-Father was another matter. On an impulse, Odin had irrevocably imprisoned dissenters from his will in living rock, using their own entrails to chain them. Loki knew pain—how to bear it, how to inflict it—but he had no desire to be broken for eternity in body and spirit by an inescapable and unremitting punishment.

            The Chitauri had tortured him—and certainly he had screamed and begged, as they expected—but they had not surprised him, not as the Green Man had done. (Better not dwell on that humiliation. It was not worth the trouble to avenge himself upon a pathetic animal.) Pain was a double-edged weapon that could be used against the giver of it, but of this strategy the Chitauri were ignorant. They saw pain as an absolute value, a currency they used to bend minds and wills to their own. But they had not bent his. They had scored his flesh, thinking that they had mastered him. Once he was free, they threatened him, and cuffed him like a cur or a disobedient child, but in the end their transaction with him had cost them dearly, and they still failed to understand why.

            Loki needed to plan anew. He knew now that these humans were no easier to rule than the cats that haunted their New York alleys. And he had little taste for being a Chitauri pawn. No, better give up that hope and recapture his dream of sitting upon the throne of Asgard. He would already be there, had he not been betrayed. There had to be a way, despite Thor and the All-Father, and the heroes set against him. He would convince them. They had to see that he had been born to rule.

             Ah! Asgard! His beautiful kingdom, with its clean, cold air, and wide vistas of the heavens. Ah! The power he would wield there. No one would challenge him, once he had defeated his enemies. Here all was smirched with human filth and pettiness. In Asgard....

            The waitress was already walking towards him with a steaming coffee pot before he noticed and waved her off. Too lost in his own thoughts to think of what was around him! Luckily it had only been a waitress.

            And then something suddenly felt very wrong.

            A man in a dark suit walked swiftly past the window, glanced at Loki once, and put a hand up to his ear. S.H.I.E.L.D. was here, and Loki had been caught napping. He had been sloppy and stupid—stupid!—to forget his pursuers for even an instant. When he had killed that idiot Coulson, the rest of them had reacted as if he’d murdered their first-born sons. He never understood why some deaths made a difference to these creatures while others were ignored. Loki left a glamour at the table to stir his coffee, and waited, invisible, to one side of the door.

            When the team burst through the entrance, the other patrons gasped and screamed. Loki waited, still as death. When they had surrounded his table with guns drawn, he slipped out and stood in the closed entryway of the shop next door. A long black car pulled up. Nick Fury jumped out and stalked past him into the café.

            “I never had a chance to debrief you, Loki,” Fury said, smiling his oily smile, “so I built you another cage. Now we’ll have all the time we need.”

            Loki had suspected they would torture him if they had the chance, and here was the proof. He turned his face away as the glamour burst through the glass of the café window and hared down towards 42nd Street. Loki took off running the other way. The glamour rounded the corner and disappeared with a pop. Loki turned his corner, and—

            Saw a glimpse of red and found himself flying through the air. Before he could breathe, he was crushed against a brick wall in an alley filled with an assortment of malodorous garbage cans. So closely confined by Mjolnir, the wall, and his brother’s strong arms, that there was no chance of summoning a glamour.

            Thor’s rage was crackling around his head in a halo of sparks. “What have you done, brother? Why must you come back to this place and cause trouble and pain? Do you know how long I have searched for you?”

            “Since I vacated my cage, I imagine,” Loki smirked. “How did you find me?”

            Thor breathed out hard and made an inarticulate growl. “You left enough traces. As if you wanted to tease me while you played your nasty tricks.”

            “I came among the mortals as a friend,” Loki said sweetly, cocking his head to look straight into his brother’s livid eyes. “Their lives are rounds of slavery and dullness. I offer them magic, a look at a world they will never know but through glimpses such as I afford them. It does their hearts good.”

            Thor’s eyes widened and he made a scoffing sound, and it really was vulgar, and beneath a prince of Asgard, but he was starting to sound like them, smell like them, probably from rolling in the muck with that woman. “People died, Loki. Two dozen souls perished by your fault since you have come to this place, not to count the deaths already on your conscience from your other visits.”

            “My conscience?” Loki smiled, and let the smile reach his eyes. “These mortals need no help of mine to die. They slaughter each other daily, and so very inventively, it nearly puts me to shame!”

            Thor shook his head. “The tricks you played had consequences, brother. The man you perched atop a tall building....”

            Loki frowned. “He did not fall. Had he fallen, the joke would have tumbled with him.” He smiled again, more wolfishly this time.

            “He had a heart attack. His wife became ill. His elderly parents—“

            “Enough!” Loki cried impatiently. It had happened again, that pang in his chest. It was Thor’s fault. Thor made him feel this way, made him despise himself. Suddenly he felt sick with spite, and let it reach his lips. “You worry about the reeking apes that people this planet? You, a prince of Asgard? For shame! You would do better to worry about your brother, to allow him to find a bit of pleasure, since he cannot have his kingdom.”

            “Our father sits upon the throne of Asgard!” Thor roared. “There is no reasoning with you. You have betrayed your family and your home.” He turned his face away and breathed heavily, trying to control himself. As if it had a life of its own, Mjolnir squeezed Loki’s slim body harder against the filthy brick wall.

            Loki regretted his momentary longing for Asgard, for the clean air and the vistas of home. Home! It was not his home, nor had it ever truly been. He, a changeling child, had been brought into Asgard by an act of charity. Better Odin had left him to die! At this moment, had Mjolnir’s sacred metal not already touched his flesh, he would disappear and find another city to despoil. Let Thor continue the chase, let him hunt Loki forever! Mjolnir, made of Odin’s strongest magics, only tolerated truth, and clear vision, all things right and true. All things not Loki. The touch of the metal sent currents of pain racing through his flesh, though he showed not a tremor of it. He hated the hammer, and the hammer hated him.

            He whispered, “My family? There is no one like me.”

            Looking at him once more, Thor shook his head impatiently. “We are your family. It is not in your nature to accept our love, I know not why. But you are, even now, my brother. I will defend you to the point of death, but I will not give you unbridled use of the earth for your”—he paused, seeking a word—“for your ‘pleasure,’ as you say. These acts are unworthy of you, Loki, can you still not see that?” His voice broke on the final words. Scowling, he pulled the chains from his belt and fastened them to Loki’s wrists. “Until you learn this lesson, you will remain in prison, under Odin’s rule. In a stronger cage, this time. I fear you will never leave it.”

            Thor proffered the magical gag, the one that would bottle up Loki’s powers, and his voice. Loki saw no choice, but did not miss the opportunity for one more essay. He compressed his lips into a sad little smile, one that he could see was entirely wasted. And, though he knew he was going too far, he spoke gently, coaxingly. “Brother, can you not trust me as far as Asgard? I will bow to your wishes that I leave Midgard with you. Then I will travel to some other realm, and you will hear naught of me again.”

            Thor looked furiously into his face. “I cannot trust you as far as the corner of this street. If only I could. I can leave the gag off if you wish it, brother,” he spat, “but in that case I will surrender you to S.H.I.E.L.D. They will enjoy your company for a year or two, or perhaps longer, but you might not enjoy theirs.”

            Loki grew angry at this further sign of Thor’s betrayal, and spoke more urgently, forgetting his wheedling tone. “You would give me up to S.H.I.E.L.D.? And if they wish to cause me pain? If they seek to break me in body and spirit? If they kill me? You would allow it, my brother?”

            Thor held the gag up again. “Choose,” he said quietly.

            The game grew tiresome. Loki laughed deprecatingly and accepted the hateful bond with his mouth. Thor had won this time. Loki had been well and truly snared through his own carelessness, for the moment, at least.

            As always he was misunderstood. Thor, the golden child, the one worthy to hold Mjolnir—how could he see into Loki’s heart?

            His heart. It was time to retreat there again, and he dreaded the moment when his fancy would have no outward distraction, when he would be left with his own thoughts, his glamours, with his hatred and his rage for sole companions. Once again, he would be stranded, shipwrecked in a landscape of his own creation. He had made of his heart a snow-dusted plain, an icy desolation where no path led, and where none ever came willingly, nor ever would again.

 

 


End file.
